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Dramatic Structure and Plot: ... or How To Keep Your Story From Circling The Drain
Dramatic Structure and Plot: ... or How To Keep Your Story From Circling The Drain
As I was planning to teach my first session for MWA University on dramatic structure and plot, I
thought a lot about what works in a mystery novel and what doesn't. After all, I write them. I
read gobs of them. Is plotting simply sequencing scenes?
If only. Because then they'd be a whole lot easier to write. But nothing loses me faster in a
mystery novel than a plot in which this happens, and then this happens, and then this happens,
and things just keep on happening but there's no tension building. That's a plot that's circling the
drain instead of heading toward the finish line.
So, how do you build in forward momentum? It helps to pay attention to something as basic and
ancient as the three-act structure.
This diagram shows how the plot of a mystery novel can be laid out in three acts.
Across horizontal axis are the pages of the novel, separated into acts.
The vertical axis is rising stakes, and with them, tension.
The little arrows represent scenes strung together (of course there are more of them in an actual
novel) and grouped into three acts.
The dashed line is the journey of the main character (the sleuth).
The curly arrows are major plot twists, surprises that change the direction of the story and
reversals that leave the sleuth's investigation back to square one.
The plot is framed by a dramatic opening at the start and resolution at the end.
Whatever it is, the essential role of the opening scene is to get the reader interested enough to
keep reading. The opening scene sets up the mystery, and often poses an unanswered question
that got answered by the novel's' end.
For example, here are brief descriptions of a few dramatic openings and the questions they
posed:
A baby is found abandoned on the steps of a church.
Unanswered question: Who left the baby on the church steps, and what happened to the babys
mother?
(In the Bleak Midwinter, Julia Spencer-Fleming)
A criminal defense attorney meets her new client a woman accused of killing her cop-
boyfriend. The woman extends a hand and says, Pleased to meet you, Im your twin.
Unanswered question: Is this woman the defense attorneys twin sister and is she a murderer?
(Mistaken Identity, Lisa Scottoline)
PI Bill Smith receives a late night telephone call from the NYPD, who are holding his fifteen-
year-old nephew Gary.
Unanswered question: Why would Gary ask for Smith? Smith hasnt seen Gary for years and
is estranged from Garys parents.
(Winter and Night, S. J. Rozan)
Bottom line: write an opening that captures the reader's attention without shooting yourself in the
foot. Here are a few of the mistakes that are all too easy to make:
Stealing the novel's thunder: An opening that is fabulously exciting all right, but it reveals
something that serves the overall novel better by being revealed later.
False promises: An opening that feels stylistically at odds with the scenes that follow.
Too much too soon: An opening with so much graphic sex, gruesome violence, or profanity
that it turns many readers off; writers can get away with going over the top in all these
categories without losing readers once they've gotten their story rolling and earned their
reader's trust.
What unifies a mystery novel is that dashed line in the diagram: the sleuths quest. Drama works
in direct proportion to how miserable you make your protagonist. Roadblocks and setbacks make
it an interesting journey.
So give your character trouble, and have some of it be of his own making. But modulate the
misery. Begin with minor woes and build as the story progresses to its final climax. From time to
time, things should improve. Then, just when it looks as if your protagonist is out of the woods,
let the next disaster befall him.
Finally, keep raising the stakes, insert a ticking clock, and above all, make it personal. Reaching
the end goal should feel heroic, worth all the pain and misery your protagonist had to overcome
along the way.
Mystery novels culminate in a climactic scene in which the final shoes drop and the puzzle is
solved. That climactic scene contains the payload for the entire novel. Its one of the most
important scenes in your booksecond only to the dramatic opening. Often that scene is fraught
with mortal danger as a clock ticks down. The sleuth and the villain duke it out, face to face -- if
not physically then verbally.
After the climax comes a coda, a more contemplative scene in which the reader gets a chance to
breathe again and mull over what happened.
In most mysteries, the protagonist triumphs, the villain is defeated, and justice is served. The
ending should be plausible, surprising, and most importantly, satisfying. Dont feel rule-bound if
some unusual ending suits your story, but whatever you do, be sure that in the end it is crystal
clear whodunit, why, and how. Your reader should never be left scratching his head.
By the end, too, the protagonist has completed a journey, solved the puzzle, and often come to
terms with some unfinished issue from his own past.
Hallie Ephron is the author of the Edgar-nominated Writing and Selling Your Mystery Novel:
How to Knock 'Em Dead with Style and of suspense novels including Come and Find Me and
Never Tell a Lie.